NA TURE 



[Jan. 29, 1885 



retained what Hellwald says concerning the English 

 people. 



The volume is quite equal to the best of its 

 predecessors. The physical geography of Europe occu- 

 pies quite one-half, and while necessarily of the nature 

 of a summary, seems to us carefully and accurately 

 written. The second part of the volume is devoted 

 to what is known as " political " geography, while Mr. 

 Chisholm has collected into an appendix a very useful 

 series of statistical tables. As usual we have Prof. 

 Keane's valuable ethnological appendix, occupying some 

 thirty pages. Though Europe is the best-known of 

 the Continents, its ethnology is more difficult to deal with 

 than that of any other part of the world. " Races " and lan- 

 guages have become so mixed up and interchanged, that 

 it is a matter of great difficulty to distinguish between 

 the various elements. Mr. Keane has some difficult pro- 

 blems to face, but probably no one is more competent to 

 solve them. His sections on " pure races " and " mixed 

 languages " are of special interest ; he rightly concludes 

 that in Europe we have neither the one nor the other, 

 nor probably will they be found in any part of the 

 world. These ethnological appendices are quite worthy 

 of being collected and extended and published separately 

 as a useful manual of ethnology. The maps in the present 

 volume are many, and of much scientific value. This 

 " Compendium " as a whole may be accepted as a really 

 trustworthy and manageable geographical reference-book. 



Nine Years in Nipon : Sketches of Japanese Life and 

 Manners. By Henry Faulds, L.F.P.S. (London: 

 Alexander Gardner, 18S5.) 

 The author of this beautiful and entertaining volume is a 

 missionary doctor who, in the course of his nine years' 

 residence in Japan, has, as he tells us, mixed with every 

 class in the country except the very highest. He has visited 

 most of the usual sights, such as Fuji, Nikko, and the 

 inland sea, but otherwise his professional duties appear to 

 have kept him very close to Tokio. To make up for this he 

 has seen the lower and middle classes of Japan as few other 

 Europeans have had the opportunity of seeing them, and 

 after all he is able to say that the land is not all barren. 

 He stands up bravely against the redoubtable Miss Bird 

 for the much-maligned morality of the Japanese people. 

 He thinks that brilliant lady's dictum that the nation is 

 sunk in immorality extremely harsh and erroneous. The 

 recent intellectual progress of the Japanese is, he believes, 

 very striking, though not as yet so general as many 

 have supposed ; their political progress is unprecedented, 

 but he thinks that on the whole the moral elevation of the 

 mass of the people within the last decade has been still 

 more striking and noteworthy. A considerable portion of 

 the volume is made up of bright, lively sketches of scenes 

 by the way in Tokio, and along the roads in the interior. 

 These are' very well done, but they might almost be equally 

 well done by an ordinary tourist with some literary gifts 

 and graces. It is in the last half of the volume that we come 

 on the real student and acute observer of Japan. It is 

 only an old resident, whose familiarity with the everyday 

 sights and sounds around him had never blunted his 

 original sense of their picturesqueness and strangeness, 

 that could have written the chapters on the Japanese philo- 

 sophy of flowers, Japanese art in relation to nature, 

 and how the Japanese amuse themselves. In connec- 

 tion with the universal spread of education throughout 

 Japan (the author can only recall one or two clear 

 instances in his experience of Japanese people being 

 unable to read or write), he makes an observation which 

 we do not remember to have seen or heard before, viz. 

 that the cause is Buddhism. The effect of what he calls 

 the new and genial enthusiasm of humanity, which came 

 from India, taught everywhere the unity and brotherhood 

 of man, and so literature could no longer be maintained 

 as the peculiar possession of any caste of mere priests or 



princes. " My Garden and its Guests " is a delightful 

 chapter of popular natural history. In an introductory 

 chapter, in which he surveys the canvas on which he is 

 about to draw his sketches, he has a few words to say on 

 the ethnology of the Japanese. He says that the Ainos, 

 " in spite of a great deal of crude writing on the subject " 

 (to which, it should be stated, Mr. Faulds has added his 

 mite, though not in this book), cannot show any claim to 

 be considered the aborigines ; they are not necessarily 

 older in their occupancy than the Japanese themselves. 

 This heterodox statement is thrown off with ^nonchalant 

 air, as of one making a common matter-of-fact observa- 

 tion ; but it would be interesting to know the author's 

 grounds for it. The shell-heaps (to take only a single 

 instance) which have been found near Tokio, and even 

 farther south, and which resemble in every respect heaps 

 formed, or in process of formation, outside Aino Mi- 

 lages in Yezo,form a strong argument the other way ; we 

 were under the impression, also, that history told us of 

 the existence of Ainos on the spot on which Ota Dokan 

 built himself the fort which afterwards grew into Yedo 

 in the fifteenth century. But it seems waste of time to 

 refer to such matters in the case of a man who has the 

 hardihood to confess that he does not know exactly what 

 a Mongol is, and that he thinks it only deepens our ignor- 

 ance immensely to call another race Mongoloid. To 

 make up for this, however, and by way of washing his 

 hands clear of the matter, he gives all the original theories 

 by which science, aided by tradition, accounts for the 

 original migration of the Japanese people. As there are 

 six points of the compass (zenith and nadir being added) 

 in far-eastern cosmography, so there are theories ot 

 migration from each one of these six points : — (1) the soil 

 (Buddhist view) ; (2) America ; (3) China, or Accadia ; 

 (4) Africa, or the Malay Peninsula, or the Southern Isles 

 of the Pacific; (5) Saghalin, or Kamtschatka ; (6) the 

 celestial regions of the Sun ; with which comprehensive 

 category Mr. Faulds takes leave of ethnology. For the 

 rest, the book is as charming in all externals as in its 

 contents. It should take its place in the front rank 

 among popular books on Japan ; indeed, since Mitford's 

 " Tales of Old Japan," we cannot recall a more interest- 

 ing volume on the country, or one which should be more 

 read in England. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 



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Krakatoa 



By the return from the Caroline Islands, on the 25th inst., of 

 the Jennie Walker, I am enabled to supply a few additional 

 details about the westward progress of the equatorial smoke 

 stream from Krakatoa in September 18S3. In Nature, Octo- 

 ber 2 (p. 537), is my extract from Miss Catlicart's journal de- 

 scribing the obscuration of the sun at Kusaie, or Strong's Island, 

 on September 7, 1883. The Rev. Dr. Pease and wife came as 

 passengers by the Jennie Walker. They state that, while they 

 were dressing their children on the morning of September 7, 

 the natives came anxiously asking what was the matter with the 

 sun, which rose over the mountains with a strange aspect. It 

 was cloudless, but pale, so as to be stared at freely. Its colour 

 Dr. Pease called a sickly greenish-blue, as if plague-stricken. 

 Mrs. Pease's journal described it as "of a bird's-egg-blue, 

 softened as this colour would be by a thin gauze." Around the 

 sun the sky was of a silvery gray. At the altitude of 45° the sun 

 appeared of its usual brightness, but resumed its pallid green 

 aspect as it declined in the west. 



